Research Summary
I like research and I see potential projects and ideas in every aspect of my job. I have multiple interests areas and that suits my personality and work ethic nicely. I believe collaboration is also essential to effective research practices because none of us exist in an isolation bubble and I think that what we build together is perhaps far stronger than anything we do individually.
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Currently, my primary research focuses on the narrative spaces created as a result of the collision of social media and health care, in particular chronic illness. Much can be learned from the study of this collision, both for technical and professional communication professors in terms of how we use social media and how we teach students to see its value as well as healthcare practitioners who want to know more about how patients use social media for their day to day care. Additionally, the way in which narrative is used in these spaces also opens up to further examine exactly what these narratives do/don’t do and how they do it; and, this opens up a space to consider what ‘is/is not or “acts as” narrative in social media. Along these lines is an additional study being developed around the ‘folklore’ of Facebook illness groups and how stories get told/retold and codified as anecdotal or as ‘fake’ and what if any efficacy or therapeutic gains might be possible through such Facebook folklore. Do social media groups in and of themselves function as “folk-groups” and if so, to what end. How might understanding these types of exchanges influence or shape physician/patient interaction and more importantly how might this information be utilized to better meet patient needs.
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Another area of interest that I have focuses on the nature of visuals and the importance of having a visually literate populace. To be so inundated with visuals in so many ways, the actual ability to read and decode the visuals around us is not a natural occurring practice. We see much but look at little in part, I believe, because individuals are not taught to read images with the same vigor with which we stress literacy and numeracy skills in other areas. We are taught to read letters on a page and to write numbers and solve equations, but direct instruction of visual literacy doesn’t happen the same way. Visuals are used to convey a variety of information and used to persuade and/or manipulate. A discerning viewer of visuals from medical posters in the physician office to political posters on kiosks needs to be able to identify the multiple messages at play.
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I’m also working on a project to determine the technological awareness of students in our technical writing course. A colleague and I piloted a survey instrument with several of our fall 2019 classes to see if the instrument would be effective on a larger scale and to test the wording of questions to make sure we were gathering the data we needed. I’m in the process of writing up the IRB proposal for a more formal study that would include faculty and students. We need to identify what skills our students have or don’t have to ensure that our expectations are realistic, to ensure we’re truly meeting students’ needs and to identify any gaps we may have in our own learning that we need to close in order to better serve students’ needs. If students are more comfortable with Google Docs than MS Word, perhaps we need to change the parameters of an assignment. But without data, we can’t really ‘see’ so our goal is to gather that data first in the English and Languages department and then potentially campus wide.
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I have several smaller projects in the works related to my more literary inclinations; the first is a paper on women in liminal spaces, a second on Melville’s Moby Dick as a retelling of the Jonah story and a third on the use of windows, doors and rooftops as a reflection of the ‘gaze’ and its use in a collection of stories written by Middle-Eastern writers (ex-pats). I also have several creative elements that I work on from time to time. As a writer, I think it's important to write what you know, so I do. Stories are an indelible part of who we are as humans - in some ways, stories might be what makes us human. There are so many stories to tell and to share and to pass on from one generation to the next. Without stories, our history dies with us.